Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Advance Qld Industry Research Fello
School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr. Yahia Ali serves as a research fellow and lecturer within the School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia. His primary research focus centers on applying scientific principles to address industrial challenges. He earned his PhD from the University of Queensland, while his MSc and BSc were obtained from the German University in Cairo. Throughout his career, he has amassed extensive expertise in areas such as alloy design, solidification, tribology of materials, and characterization techniques.
In conjunction with his academic responsibilities, Dr. Ali collaborates closely with the UQ Materials Performance (UQMP) consulting group. This interdisciplinary interaction between research and consulting significantly shapes his research direction, particularly in tackling industrial issues. As an illustration, Dr. Ali and his team have developed a distinctive range of devices for evaluating the performance of wear-resistant materials against abrasion and fracture. In Australia, Dr. Ali and his team holds a pivotal role in advancing the mining sector, providing innovative materials solutions, spanning from failure investigation to the development of novel materials. Through consecutive endeavors, they have influenced substantial business decisions for renowned companies like Rio-Tinto, Bradken, Molycop, IXL Metal Casting, Trelleborg, and others, often involving multi-million-dollar investments.
In 2023, Dr. Ali was honored as an Advance Queensland Industry Fellow, with a specific focus on developing sustainable alloys tailored for Queensland's agricultural and mining sectors. Additionally, he leads several projects concentrated on devising new testing techniques that can be conducted in the laboratory while preserving the authentic complexity of the industrial field environment.
Dr Xiaodong Ma obtained his Bachelor's Degree in 2006 and a Master Degree in 2009 from Dalian University of Technology, China, then graduated with a PhD in 2012 from The University of Tokyo, Japan, supported by the Japanese Government (Monbukagakusho: MEXT) Scholarship.
Dr Ma joined The University of Queensland in 2012 right after his PhD graduation starting as a postdoctoral research fellow.
Dr Ma is now the acting group leader of the High-Temperature Processing (HTP) group and leading the HTP Program at JKMRC, SMI of UQ. He is an expert in the experimental and modelling research on thermodynamics and kinetics of high-temperature materials processing for ferrous, non-ferrous and advanced materials. He has extensive hands-on experiences in fundamental study and applied research including solar cell silicon purification, ironmaking, steel secondary refining, copper smelting, metal extraction from low-grade complexed ores, and waste treatment, etc. His research activities also extend to the development of high-strength and high-end specials steels by sophisticated control of second phase particles. Along with the research, he is also good at materials characterization by operating the analytical facilities of SEM, EPMA, TEM, XRD, ICP, etc. He is a pyrometallurgical specialist with a strong interest lying in the decarburization of ironmaking and steelmaking with hydrogen metallurgy and lower CO2 emission technologies in the metallurgical sector.
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre led by Prof. Evgueni Jak.
He graduated with a Master in Chemistry (chemical thermodynamics) from Lomonosov's Moscow State University, Deparment of Chemistry in 2012. His Master's Thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the NaOH-Al(OH)3-Na2SiO3-H2O system for applications in Bayer's process of bauxite treatment" as part of a bigger project initiated in collaboration with Rusal company aimed at utilisation/valorisation of red mud residues accumulated during the production of aluminium oxide from bauxite ores.
In 2019, he completed a PhD in Metallurgical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada within The Centre For Research in Computational Thermodynamics (CRCT), where he acquired expertise in FactSage software, multicomponent database development, and was included in the list of official collaborators of FactSage. His PhD thesis was "Thermodynamic optimization of the Na2O-K2O-Al2O3-CaO-MgO-B2O3-SiO2 system" sponsored by Glass Consortium including Corning and SCHOTT glass producers. The purpose of the database he developed was to assist the industry in designing new glasses with special properties: chemically hardened glasses (smartphones), technical glasses with high thermal and chemical resilience (boron-containing glasses), chemically inert glasses, etc.
Short after receiving his PhD, Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev accepted a position at The University of Queensland as part of the Pyrometallurgy Innovation Centre's team where he has an official title of Theme Leader in Thermodynamic Computations, combining his broad expertise in metallurgy, chemical engineering, applied mathematics, and programming.
Dr Evgenii Nekhoroshev has always been passionate about formalisation and automation of big research tasks. He started working on developing an automated solver for thermodynamic optimisation during his PhD thesis which was improved and finalised using the ideas of Prof. Evgueni Jak about real-time derivative matrix optimization and sensitivity analysis applicable to large multicomponent systems. His contribution to the Centre allowed to make transition to a continuous optimization approach when experimental and modelling streams of work in the Centre are efficiently combined together. It allows to include the most recent experimental datasets into a self-consistent database update with minimal time delays.
Centre for Advanced Materials Processing and Manufacturing
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Research Fellow
School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology
Availability:
Available for supervision
Dr. Xin Fu Tan is an ARC Early Career Industry Fellow. Their research interests encompass the areas of electronics manufacturing, hydrogen storage materials, synchrotron radiation techniques, and electron microscopy. Dr. Tan is currently employed as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Queensland, working on an ARC Discovery Project titled "Intermetallic compounds for high-reliability electronic interconnections" (2020-2024). Additionally, Dr. Tan holds the position of a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) International Research Fellow at Kyushu University, contributing to the project "Improving Metal Hydrides to Diversify Energy Storage and Transportation" (2022-2024), as nominated by the Australian Academy of Science (AAS).
Dr. Tan completed their PhD thesis at The University of Queensland, focusing on the development of novel anode materials for lithium-ion batteries, from 2017 to 2020. Between 2010 and 2016, Dr. Tan worked as a Material Scientist at Hydrexia Pty. Ltd., a start-up company specialising in commercialising solid-state hydrogen storage systems based on lab-developed technology from The University of Queensland. They earned a Bachelor's degree (1st class honours) in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at The University of Melbourne and a Master's degree in Advanced Engineering Materials at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. These experiences have endowed Dr. Tan with unique research expertise across various Materials Engineering fields, encompassing both academic and industrial settings.
